LIBER is delighted to announce the recipients of the 2026 Library Innovation Award, sponsored by OCLC.
The Innovation Award recognises the three abstracts submitted to the LIBER Annual Conference which best describe innovative work within the overall theme of the event: ‘The Power of Libraries in an Uncertain World’. The awardees were announced during the Awards Session at the 55th LIBER Annual Conference in Trondheim, Norway. The Awards Session was moderated by CPC Chair Giannis Tsakonas, and winners announced by Axel Kaschte, Executive Director, Product Strategy, EMEA and APAC, OCLC.
Award criteria
The criteria (in order of importance) for the Award are:
- Level of innovation
- Impact on the wider library community (especially the European library community)
- Originality
- Quality of the abstract
The three abstracts which best fulfil these criteria are selected by the Conference Programme Committee (CPC). The Award comprises the opportunity to present the winning abstract at the LIBER Annual Conference 2026 in Trondheim, free Conference registration, and travel expenses and accommodation. The Award is funded by OCLC as part of the valued, multi-year collaboration between OCLC and LIBER.
Innovation Award Winners 2026
The Conference Programme Committee for the 55th LIBER Annual Conference presents the 2026 Innovation Award to:
Libraries United: Sumy State University and the University of Liverpool
Matthew Greenhall, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom; Olha Krytska and Yana Fandikovia, Sumy State University, Ukraine
Read the full abstract (Presentation 5.3)
DSpace Reimagined: AI-Powered Search and Accessibility
Piotr Masalski, Mateusz Adamiak, Łukasz Wawer, Małgorzata Paszkowska, and Maciej Iwaniszewski, PCG Academia, Poland
Read the full abstract (Presentation 3.3)
Monitoring Strategic Technologies Using Open Research Information
Matthijs de Zwaan, Silvia Fattori, and Ruben Lacroix, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Read the full abstract (Presentation 13.1)
Best Poster Award
This year, the Best Poster Award was also kindly supported by OCLC. From a total of 23 posters, the winner of the Award was Poster Nro. 16 –
Working Together in an Uncertain World: The European Print Initiatives Collaboration (EPICo)
by Karin Byström (Uppsala University Library, Sweden), Hannah Mateer (University Library of Edinburgh, United Kingdom), and Wolfgang Mayer (University Library of Vienna, Austria).
The posters will be made available in the LIBER 2026 Zenodo community.
